Drag Queen
Meet Flamy Grant, The Drag Queen Who Just Topped The Christian Music Chart
“Shame-slaying, hip-swaying, singing-songwriting” drag queen Flamy Grant’s debut album, “Bible Belt Baby,” just landed the No. 1 spot for top album on the iTunes Christian music chart. One of her singles on the album, “Good Day,” hit No. 2 in the top songs category.
“This is a huge moment for the 16-year-old version of myself who was writing songs, hoping to be on the same stages that Amy Grant was playing as I was growing up,” the 41-year-old gospel and roots musician, who now lives in San Diego, told TODAY.com. “It’s massive and wonderful, and I’m so grateful.”
Credit: Billboard.com
Grant grew up in an evangelical fundamentalist community in Asheville, North Carolina, where she recalls not being allowed to listen to music outside of what was available at her local Christian bookstore as a kid.
Despite that, Grant says that “the impulse (toward drag) was clearly always there,” having photos of her younger self “prancing around” in her mother’s heels and nightgowns.
Grant says her church community didn’t foster that self-acceptance to embrace her true self.
“Things that would have been considered traditionally feminine or feminine characteristics were mostly subtly shamed out of me, but sometimes very blatantly shamed out of me, like ‘That’s not how a boy behaves’ kind of thing,” she says.
“I just learned really fast that if I was going to thrive in that community, I had to perform and exist in the world in a very specific way,” she adds. “And that was to be a boy and grow into a man and not rock the boat too much.”
After college, Grant got involved in Exodus International, a gay conversion organization where she enrolled herself in conversion therapy for five years.
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“I wanted to fit in that badly,” Grant says. “That’s how deep my my internalized homophobia went. And after all of those experiences, I finally got to a point where I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve done everything I can do. My sexuality is not changing.’”
Grant temporarily left the Christian faith in 2017 and started a podcast called “Heathen.” She describes it as an early precursor to the faith deconstruction movement, where a person “critically analyzes, rethinks and often shuns beliefs held by their religious faith, sometimes leaving their religion altogether.”
Grant says that through her podcast conversations with musicians engaged in deconstruction, she began to see how Christian faith was “so much bigger” than the evangelical world in which she grew up.
“When that’s your starting point in life — that you believe that you’re a wretch, that you’re sinful, that God can’t love you — that does not set you off on very good footing,” she says. “That is why religious trauma is a real thing, and why so many of us have spent thousands of dollars in therapy as adults.”
She says she returned to Christianity to help children going through the same isolating experience she endured.
“Those kids need to know that [evangelicalism is] not the only option available to them,” Grant said. “That they can have a faith and they can be a Christian and it doesn’t have to look like (that) version of Christianity.”
Grant’s pastor asked her to give a sermon in drag which led to a viral TikTok in which she did her makeup and told a story in 60 seconds.
“I was weeping as I was scrolling through the comments and just listening to people say things like, ‘Wow, this makes me feel seen. This makes me feel safe. Thank you so much for doing this,'” Grant says of her overnight viral fame. “That was when it clicked for me: I’ve been doing this drag thing just for me to heal my own inner child, but it’s actually doing some similar work for a lot of people.”
“I want to make music,” Grant says. “I want to have an impact. I want to be able to play shows for people. I love to entertain folks, I love to be in front of an audience.”
And so, Flamy Grant was born — a stage name with a cheeky reference to Amy Grant.
Grant says she hopes kids growing up in a similar Christian community like she had “will find her music, and that her visibility as a Christian artist will make LGBTQ+ youth feel safer in Christian spaces.”
“I watched people get kicked out of my community for breaking those rules, and it’s scary because they tell you that there’s nothing good waiting for you on the other side. The whole world is cast as this deviant, scary, bad place,” Grant says. “So it means everything to me to be able to have a little bit of presence on the Christian charts in Christian music space.”
She says the response to her album hitting No. 1 in the Christian genre on iTunes has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
“One woman just messaged me today and was like, ‘My soul has been craving an opportunity to venture back into spiritual community, and I just haven’t known how to do it because I just believed that the church wasn’t for me anymore … This has changed that for me, and it’s given me the courage to explore queer-affirming churches.'”
